Whether you are interested in using low-cost horizontally-scalable server architectures, large vertically-scalable multi-domain servers, blade servers, thin-client architectures or anything in between, Essant can help you to deliver an integrated infrastructure solution.

Essant have been delivering Unix based platforms for Oracle to the Financial Services Industry, and other sectors that require enterprise class computing, for many years.More recently the advent of Blade Technology, Virtualisation and Unified Computing models have brought additional dimensions, and challenges, to how an organisation may choose to deploy and manage its computing infrastructure.

Essant continue to be at the forefront of this server revolution and whether you choose to deploy your server infrastructure in your own data centre, one of Essant’s hosting centres, or another third party facility the Essant Solutions team can cover every aspect of server technology, including:

• Enterprise Servers
• Blade Servers
• Thin-Client Solutions
• Clustering
• Virtualisation
• Utility Computing
• Remanufactured Systems

Pre-sale: we help our customers to 'size and capacity plan' the optimum solution.
Post-sale: our teams can work with your own personnel to configure, implement and commission the integrated solution.

As IT has become central to core business processes, data centres are taking a central role in the overall success of an organisation. As always, a data centre must excel at the traditional measures of operational excellence including system availability, asset and space utilisation, security, and power/cooling efficiency.

But now, data centres must also support a new set of emerging requirements, including business-to-business relationships, regulatory requirements, a global operating environment, and empowered users. And finally, data centres must be able to adapt quickly and effortlessly to inevitable change.

The Essant Data Centre Switching Portfolio provides a granular cost-effective path to upgrading the capacity of your data centre network and is built on the following common tenants:

• Design flexibility: Modular, rack, and integrated blade switches are optimised for both Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments.
• Industry-leading switching capabilities: Layer 2 and 3 functions can help build stable, secure, scalable data centres.
• Investment protection: Adaptability simplifies capacity and capability upgrades.
• Continuous operations: A combination of hardware redundancy and features such as in-service software upgrades and Smart Call Home helps maximise network availability.
• Operational manageability: Integrated management tools simplify operations and accelerate problem resolution.
• Transport flexibility: The broad portfolio of switches eases migration to new technologies.

By aligning your IT people, processes, and technology with your business objectives, the new, virtualised data centre helps you address business challenges. Essant's portfolio of Data Centre Switching Solutions helps transform infrastructure silos into pools of resources that can be dynamically aligned to meet your application and business needs.

Why Virtualise?

The underlying objective of Virtualisation is to to improve utilisation and control, this is achieved by moving duplicated and difficult to manage resources from remote sites onto shared platforms in the data centre. Building a Virtualised Environment will require the implementation of several key technologies, probably from multiple vendors, to support an effective Virtualisation Strategy. The following diagram shows what a fully Virtualised Environment could look like across a complete system architecture, click it to enlarge.


So why would you want to go to all the trouble of building a Virtualised Infrastructure? We believe that there are 5 key reasons for doing so:

• Simplify the management of large estates of servers, PCs and storage platforms.
• Improve the utilisation of IT resources, reduce unnecessary duplication of devices and save on operational costs.
• Control and manage remote offices and mobile workers who create security, management and maintenance issues.
• Consolidate and centralise IT resources using high performance networks and acceleration technologies.
• Reduce the numbers of servers, storage arrays and other system devices with a smaller footprint which will lead to a reduced power requirement, for both powering and cooling, for the Data Centre resulting in both 'green' benefits and costs savings.

What to Virtualise?

Which elements of your systems architecture is it most beneficial to Virtualise? There are too many variables and dependancies to make a general statement, however Virtualisation Technologies are being deployed across all layers of the systems architecture to enable consolidation and sharing of IT resources through a single management interface. The following 5 levels of Virtualisation should help you identify where the 'quick wins' are for your organisation, and Essant's Virtualisation Planning and Analysis Service will provide more information to help you understand and build your business case.

An important note:

As with any emerging technology the Virtualised Infrastructure will be the target for new security threats. It is therefore essential that your security environment and the impact on firewalls, remote access and other security devices is considered at the outset.

The next steps:

Essant's aim is to ensure Virtualisation provides a better return on investment by making sure it is as easy as possible to understand, design and deploy. Woking with Essant will enable you to:

• Identify the best solutions to Virtualise your infrastructure.
• Select the most appropriate vendor technology to work with.
• Choose the best security solution with which to protect the Virtualised Environment.
• Ensure a smooth transition into the Virtualised Environment using Essant's Planning and Analysis Services.

Your data centre infrastructure must evolve rapidly to improve resiliency, increase business responsiveness, and keep up with the growing demands of new applications while reducing overall power consumption. Storage costs are growing faster than server costs, increasing the need for efficient and cost-effective storage area networks. In highly competitive environments that must meet with industry and regulatory compliance for data recovery, 24-hour access to critical information is imperative.

Essant’s Storage Networking Solutions provide:

• Multi-protocol storage networking - Reduces business risk by providing flexibility and options - FC, FICON, FCoE, iSCSI, and FCIP
• Unified OS and Management tools for reduced operational expense - operational simplicity, seamless interoperability, and feature consistency
• Enterprise-class storage connectivity to support significantly higher virtualised workloads - availability, scalability, and performance
• Services-Oriented SANs - to extend "Any Network Service to any Device" regardless of Protocol, Speed, Vendor, or Location
  

Essant’s solutions for storage area networks include:

• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuance - You have instantaneous access to data from multiple tiers, for disaster recovery.
• Virtualisation - IT managers can provision their storage infrastructure.
• Security - Your data is protected when it is at rest and while it is being transported and replicated.
• Consolidation - Storage professionals can consolidate resources by taking advantage of highly scalable, intelligent SAN platforms.
• Data Mobility - A seamless, non-disruptive migration strategy is imperative for deployment flexibility and to support dynamic growing challenges of enterprise.
  

Storage area networks are central to an Infrastructure 3.0 architecture, providing a networking platform that helps IT departments achieve lower total cost of ownership, enhanced resiliency, and greater agility through.